Had a little flex time today to set up the B1 and shoot a selfie. Ah, my favorite subject (not).

Well, in a pinch when you need to learn, luckily Olympus makes it easy to self shoot in studio. I turn on the iOS app and hook up to the EM5 wifi, then i can tap my phone screen to focus and set the self timer to take the image.

The Profoto was pretty easy using the air remote. I set it on TTL as an experiment and was pleasantly surprised. Even at different ISO and apertures, the light was fairly consistent and even quality. I would to go back over to the camera each time if shooting in manual.

The following video highlights 2 things. My new online video brand "Digital Darkroom" as well as the difference in F/4 and F/1.4 in studio with lighting.

Coming to you with a new update from LR that is hot off the presses. The update is not on the site yet but I assume it will show you soon what we learned in the CC console update. Along with PS 2017 we have the update for LR that adds the following:

Lightroom CC version 2015.8: Performance Improvements

The Lightroom CC 2015.8 comes with some changes that will improve the responsiveness of the Lightroom experience. As soon as you install the new version of the application, you will notice some improvements in image editing responsiveness when you move files between folders, run catalog backups or do any other background tasks.

Lightroom CC version 2015.8: Fit/Fill Improvements

When using ultra high-resolution monitors, you will be able to take advantage of the zoom to fit and zoom to fill options. We remind you that these features had some issues in the past, as they would not completely fill the Loupe window.

Lightroom CC version 2015.8: New Features

You can now create or filter a Smart Collection for images that have Snapshots associated with them or export a Collection Set as a new catalog.

With this update, we also received a new feature called Reference view. You can now take a photo and keep it on screen, while making changes to a copy of the photo. Notice I said copy, you must create a virtual copy of the file first, in order to use it as a reference. I created a short video on just how to do so. Enjoy the new content.

small <rant>, was using Edge, the new browser in Win 10 and everytime I'd go to youtube to grab the link to insert here, it would blow away my post. First time I thought it was a glitch, second time I was just dumb and did it again. So now back on Chrome < \end rant>

So let's do this! Focus stacking...what is it? In a nutshell, which most things are, is this: Taking multiple images of a scene at different focus areas using manual focus and using Photoshop to blend them together to one final image. How to do this? Great question.

The setup is easy. Put the camera on a tripod and focus on the closest item in the shot, your subject. Then just adjust the focus a little farther out on each shot, turning the focus ring and taking shots until you get to the end of the focus limiter. (infinity mark)

Can you take as many shots as you want? Of course. Can you use any f stop? sure, for this I used f/1.8. Shutter speed and ISO are irrelevant but if you need a starting point I was at ISO 50 on the sony a7rii and 55 1.8 Zeiss lens using the Joby Gorilla Pod as my tripod. It's great for getting those close to the ground shots. The mode on my camera was aperture priority so shutter speed varied a little.

I took 7 shots to compose this focus stack, and the tutorial is in the video below. The final image is posted just below the video to see exactly how this turns out. Also a gallery of the original images for reference is embedded as well.